Early identification of intellectual structure based on co-word analysis from research grants

Abstract

From the initial idea, writing, submitting, and reviewing to the online presentation of a research paper takes a long time. The identified intellectual structure of a research paper may have a certain time lag. In view of this problem, scholars have suggested that research grants may be an alternative way to identify intellectual structure as early as possible. However, these comments are mentioned qualitatively. Few researchers have verified the research grant by early identification of the intellectual structure of a field with a quantitative method. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method framework to confirm the leadlag relationship quantitatively between intellectual structures identified by the research grant and the research paper. In empirical analysis, Operations Research and Management Science in China was selected as a specific research area. The results show that the intellectual structure identified by the research grant leads the intellectual structure of a research paper by approximately 1-2 years. These discoveries, to some extent, confirm the early identification of intellectual structure based on the research grant. In addition, the results also indicate that there is high similarity between intellectual structure identified by the research grant and that in the research paper in the previous year.

Evolution and trends in intelligent tutoring systems research: a multidisciplinary and scientometric view

“…Co-occurrence analyses or co-word analyses were conducted on the keywords. The keyword network in scientific literature can be used to explore the correlations between different research studies to reveal the potential research issues and the intellectual structure in a certain research field (Chen et al, 2019 ). This method has been widely used in bibliometric studies (Wu et al, 2016 ) and has proven effective (Khasseh et al, 2017 ).…”

Visualizing research trends and research theme evolution in E-learning field: 1999–2018

“…A co-word analysis is a bibliometric technique used to analyze and illustrate the evolution of the structure of the concepts and ideas within a research field; this is done based on a co-occurrence analysis (Callon et al 1983(Callon et al , 1991 It has been widely applied to identify the knowledge structure in numerous domains, such as information systems (Liu et al 2016), information science (Deng et al 2020;Hu et al 2013), operation research and management science (Chen et al 2019) and higher education (Dehdarirad et al 2014). In line with these studies, a co-word analysis was applied in the current study.…”

“…Based on analyzing the number and strength of the connections between the nodes of a network, a SNA helps explain the unique structure of the interrelationships among individual nodes; this method has been widely used in bibliometric research and scientific development research (Jalali and Park 2018;Chen et al 2019). Such as several SNA methods can be applied to quantify the characteristics of the knowledge structure of a research field by conducting both structural holes and a core-periphery analysis and then computing the values of both the degree centrality and network density.…”

A Theoretical Framework on the Determinants of Food Purchasing Behavior of the Elderly: A Bibliometric Review with Scientific Mapping in Web of Science

“…In relation to the research objective, a network analysis was proposed that delved into the content of the documents through the co-occurrence of keywords. This methodology is especially suitable if the intention is to advance the intellectual structure of a specific part of a domain or research field [ 26 , 28 ]. As pointed out by Choi et al [ 32 ], the keywords indexed in documents and those contained in titles and abstracts are essential for the identification of significant topics within a specific research area.…”